Cold War Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Vietnam War=== {{Main|Vietnam War|Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War}} [[File:Bruce Crandall's UH-1D.jpg|thumb|US combat operations during the [[Battle of Ia Drang]], [[South Vietnam]], November 1965]] Under President [[John F. Kennedy]], US troop levels in Vietnam grew under the [[Military Assistance Advisory Group]] program from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963.{{efn-ua|{{cite web|url=https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/education/teachers/curricular-resources/high-school-curricular-resources/military-advisors-in-vietnam-1963|title=Military Advisors in Vietnam: 1963 {{!}} JFK Library|website=www.jfklibrary.org|access-date=21 June 2019}}}}{{efn-ua|[http://25thaviation.org/facts/id430.htm Vietnam War Statistics and Facts 1], 25th Aviation Battalion website.}} South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's heavy-handed [[Huế Phật Đản shootings|crackdown on Buddhist monks]] in 1963 led the US to endorse a deadly [[1963 South Vietnamese coup|military coup against Diem]].{{sfn|Miller|Wainstock|2013|pp=315–325}} The war escalated further in 1964 following the controversial [[Gulf of Tonkin incident]], in which a US destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. The [[Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]] gave President [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] broad authorization to increase US military presence, deploying ground [[Military organization|combat units]] for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000.{{sfn|Koven|2015|p=93}} Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev responded by reversing Khrushchev's policy of disengagement and increasing aid to the North Vietnamese, hoping to entice the North from its pro-Chinese position. The USSR discouraged further escalation of the war, however, providing just enough military assistance to tie up American forces.{{sfn|Tucker|2011|p=131}} From this point, the [[People's Army of Vietnam]] (PAVN), also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more [[conventional warfare]] with US and South Vietnamese forces.{{sfn|Glass|2017}} The [[Tet Offensive]] of 1968 proved to be the turning point of the war. Despite years of American tutelage and aid, the South Vietnamese forces were unable to withstand the communist offensive and the task fell to US forces instead. Tet showed that the end of US involvement was not in sight, increasing domestic skepticism of the war and giving rise to what was referred to as the [[Vietnam Syndrome]], a public aversion to American overseas military involvements. Nonetheless, operations continued to cross international boundaries: bordering areas of Laos and Cambodia were used by North Vietnam as [[Ho Chi Minh trail|supply routes]], and were heavily [[Operation Barrel Roll|bombed by US forces]].{{sfn|Kalb|2013}} At the same time, in 1963–1965, American domestic politics saw the triumph of [[Modern liberalism in the United States|liberalism]]. According to historian Joseph Crespino: :It has become a staple of twentieth-century historiography that Cold War concerns were at the root of a number of progressive political accomplishments in the postwar period: a high progressive marginal tax rate that helped fund the arms race and contributed to broad income equality; bipartisan support for far-reaching civil rights legislation that transformed politics and society in the American South, which had long given the lie to America's egalitarian ethos; bipartisan support for overturning an explicitly racist immigration system that had been in place since the 1920s; and free health care for the elderly and the poor, a partial fulfillment of one of the unaccomplished goals of the New Deal era. The list could go on.<ref>Joseph Crespino, "A Nation Ruled by Its Fears" ''Reviews in American History,'' 48#1 (March 2020), pp. 119–123, quoting p. 123. https://doi.org/10.1353/rah.2020.0016</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page